Our slithering neighbours

As with most days, the kids spent the majority of their day outdoors looking for lizards, geckos and scorpions. When Josh knocked on my door to announce that they had found a snake and needed Ali's reptile book to identify it I wasn't really surprised. I jokingly said to him "well don't go near it if it's red and black I think those are poisonous". Josh looked at me with wide eyes and said "it is black and red"....and took off running. I gathered Katie and decided to check out this snake myself. Maddy suddenly appears and tells me that Ali inquired at the park office as to what kind of snake it was and the office was now calling the fire department. Goodness, what have these kids gotten into now...I arrived at the scene minutes before the fire dept. to see a small striped snake in their white bin. After a brief discussion with the firefighters, I was relieved to find out that it is normal procedure here to call them when any snake is found. It turns out that the snake was a nonvenomous king snake...similar looking to the coral snake which is venomous. Ali enjoyed quizzing the firefighters on their local snakes and reptiles, and they were genuinely interested in all the little critters the kids had been finding. They encouraged the kids to explore, but agreed with my advice that we just don't touch the snakes we find since we are unfamiliar with the area. They told us about coming to the same spot last month to remove a snake under the same bush and ended up finding three big rattlesnakes. As they jumped in the truck they waved to the kids and told them to have fun. So much excitement in one day!